I’ve
long been an admirer of the work of Washington State poet Sarah Mangold, so am
thrilled to finally see the publication of her second trade collection, Electrical Theories of Femininity (San
Francisco CA: Black Radish Books, 2015). The author of a handful of chapbooks (including
works self-published as well as works produced by Little Red Leaves,
above/ground press, dusie, Potes & Poets Press and g o n g), her first
book, Household Mechanics, was
published in 2002 as part of the New Issues Poetry Prize, as selected by C. D.
Wright. Electrical Theories of Femininity,
much of which saw print in earlier chapbook publications, is constructed as an
extended suite of short poems and prose-poems writing “the history of media
archeology” to explore the place where human and machine meet. In an interview posted in issue #6 of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, she
describes the collection as one that “contains three recent chapbooks, plus the
shorter poems written around the same time as the longer sequences. There is a
bit of connecting sections and selecting what fits and doesn’t fit to make a ‘book.’”
She later writes that “For Electrical
Theories of Femininity I had three chapbooks to incorporate plus individual
poems which led to more movement and structural overhauls compared to the one
long poem and several shorter poems in Household
Mechanics.”

In
poems such as “How Information Lost Its Body,” “Electrical Theories of
Femininity,” “Every Man a Signal Tower” and “The First Thing the Typewriter Did
Was Provide Evidence of Itself,” Mangold explores how systems are constructed, manipulated
and broken down, even as she manages, through collage and accumulation, to move
in a number of concurrent directions. Through the collection, the “Feminism”
she writes about articulates itself as a series of conflicts, observations and electrical
impulses, such as in the opening of “An equally deedy female”: “She gathered up
the scattered sheets / a non-geometrical attempt to supply information // about
what was far and what was important / bringing it down into life [.]” Throughout
the collection, Mangold’s language sparks and flies, collides and flows in
poems that fragment the lyric into impossible shapes.

Setting
the Landscape in Motion

As soon as the incoming
stream of sounds

gives the slightest
indication

consider the real act
of moving

when we figure time as
a line or circle

when mechanical gesture
takes the place

when automatic
operations are inserted

into the automatic
world

vowels are
uninterrupted streams of energy

and thought is a
movement

from acoustic signal to
the combination

of muscular acts

saints and pilgrims

sewing machines and
machine guns

made their appearance

This
is as much an exploration of perspective, authority and various forms of both real
and imagined power, composing her mix of fact, language, theory and obvious
delight in regards to sound, shape, meaning and collage. As she writes in “I
expected pioneers”: “What people forget about the avant- / gardeforwards and backwards. The Pre-Raphaelites
wanted / to bring the background forward. The tyranny of perspective / they
wanted all views at once [.]” Further on in the collection, she opens the short
prose-poem “Mothers Must Always Prove Their Readiness” with this dark bit of
information: “Most missing girls are dead girls.” Mangold’s poems might be
filled with an unbearable lightness and sense of serious play, yet remain fully
aware of, and critique, what women are still forced to endure.

Custodians
of a Fractious Country

They are depicted with
great scientific suit sleeves

A single faculty, dandelion, don’t get him started

She’s on pasting chunks
of text, sewing collars from the wool of country life

Repeated tones:white breadletters accent

philosophical hedgehogs

But for Spencer
evolution was going somewhere

His requests to see the
surface tailored but unobtrusive opened my jaws rubbed my neck

Riots erupt

The improbably handsome

A welcomed guest

Insincerity in a
culture brings to mind the most mysterious numbers

Three volumes of
German-language units to say: (blanche your beans, then ice them)